This invention relates to the art of ditching in areas traversed by underground lines, such as buried pipelines, telephone and power cables, gas lines, etc.
Machines are now widely used for excavating such ditches and for laying such underground lines. But when such ditching machines are used in terrains traversed by buried lines, care must be exercised else the excavating member of the ditching machine can cut such existing buried lines.
At present, the intersection between a buried line and a proposed trench is excavated manually while the trenching machine is allowed to excavate only up to and on either side of said intersection so as not to cut the buried line. Such a procedure slows down considerably the speed within which the trench can be constructed.